Everything is changing and taking on new and sometimes unusual forms in this world. However, most of industries seem to be simply static when compared with the digital technology and marketing changes that are occurring at supersonic speed. As recently as yesterday, we freely added dozens of keyword direct entries to the nebulous tag clouds. Today, we are already training smartbots in messengers.
So, how do you develop projects and promote healthcare-related brands including medicine, cosmetology, pharmacy, digital health startups and fitness projects at this pace? This article was created not only to answer the question, but also to help you grasp the strategy and evolvement vector.
We are going to speak about the challenges of digital marketing and the opportunities our MRank marketing technology can provide for your business promotion.
The essence of “dehydrated” marketing
“Mayday! It needs water!” But not at this time. Dehydrated is obviously a positive characteristic in our case. Why? Unfortunately, average digital marketing, especially for healthcare projects, is like a sponge lying in a full bath.
This sponge has taken in all the digital marketing channels and promotion resources without exception. It has every intention to melt down your promotion budget and your hopes for sale rate increases in this bath with a single powerful squeeze.
So, what’s the problem? And what layers does this hated sponge consist of?
1. Focus on website promotion and not brand development
It is a critical problem. Remember, if your business has a name, logo, and a desire to grow, you have a healthcare brand. And the brand is what you should promote, regardless of your company’s size and expectations.
If you don’t develop your brand as a single package, the website itself won’t go high and won’t bring the desired results. Each promotion channel will move more slowly and with more complication.
We have an example for you. After an algorithm update, Google has seriously tightened control over medical article quality and changed the understanding of such content rating. If you won’t pay due attention to the social media presence of authors providing you healthcare content and don’t provide visible verification of their professionalism, your website won’t get the desired position in Google search results.
Thus, we have a solid connection between social media and SEO for the algorithms and at the brand level. And you can be sure that there are many more linked channels.
2. Your marketing agency does not have a healthcare specialization
Cooperate with marketing agencies that work in healthcare or related niches. A few healthcare-related showcases are not proof of expertise for you. The team should have solid working experience and a commitment to merging with your project and industry.
If a specialist has a cat food project in the morning and a wedding agency in the afternoon, then you can only imagine what he’ll think about working on plastic surgery brand promotion in the evening. We are not trying to discuss the promotion methodologies that are either effectively customized for one niche, or, as is our example, randomly adapted to all niches at once.
3. Too small budget
In this case, the fault is on the customer’s side. If you are ready to spend only a few hundreds of dollars on the healthcare brand promotion, you’d better have a tasty dinner or issue bonuses to employees. Such a solution will bring far more benefit for you and your business.
Budget is not just a sum of money. It indicates how strongly the business owner desires to develop himself and evolve his brand.
As the practice shows, there is nothing worse than working with extremely limited budgets. The marketing team becomes worried since there is no visible effect. The customer remains disappointed, as there are no desired results.
When addressing any marketing agency with a limited budget, you will most likely hear that this money will cover only technical SEO and basic onsite optimization. Will these activities impact your sales flow in some way? The answer is no, they won’t.
Even more useless spending for a healthcare segment is to waste budget on an ad campaign on some random social media channel. So, think twice before making any investment.
As mentioned above, search engine optimization activities are extremely important. SEO is a top-priority channel for health projects. Searching the Internet, people prefer to ask precise and complicated questions, hoping to receive a clear and accurate answers from a specialist instead of choosing one clinic out of a thousand. The key task of SEO is to provide this answer in your website content.
4. No strategy
Write down all points as precisely as possible right from the start. Spend time on strategy research from the very beginning and you’ll be able to single out the most effective promotion channels and save your efforts and budget by avoiding useless marketing activities.
Custom channel allocation is of utmost importance for health brands. Even such seemingly unremarkable channel as forums can turn into an effective and reliable source of customer acquisition for a highly-specialized clinic.
A technology you don’t have
As studies by British scientists have shown, work on a software development ends up with some result in 90% of cases. The results are visible, and the application demonstrates at least some signs of life, even if the team did not care much about its quality. Why does the same approach not work for marketing? Why does the community show deep distrust in SEO services while ad campaigns end up with a wasted budget and not a single lead?
The answer is simple: there is no custom-made marketing technology. Developers, for example, have frameworks tailored for specific tasks. Why not use something similar in digital marketing?
MRank is our marketing framework
Working in digital marketing for more than 8 years, we always had a feeling that something was missing. Something more than just ads, SEO guides and smart manipulations with the link mass.
The RenoDigital Health team has been focusing on healthcare projects and sports startups for the last 4 years. We’ve cooperated with various clients: from clinics to the largest medical publishing houses. Our experience has allowed us to develop an exclusive technique for healthcare brand promotion, which we named MRank.
MRank is a technology with a modular structure. The maximum available number of modules right now is 36. But we are continuing to enhance the technology by taking into account up-to-date trends, evaluating our mistakes and making technical improvements. Some stages will drop away due to their irrelevance. Each module is a promotion channel with a set of perks, cases, and stats specially optimized for health projects.
When analysing a new project, we formulate a strategy from 16-28 modules on average. This covers all the requirements of a healthcare brand promotion, whether it is a highly-specialized clinic or a large project with numerous sub-niches.
Each module has its own estimation in MRank Points (MRP). As an example, technical SEO usually gets 8 MRP, while an ad campaign by the local sector of potential customers on Facebook receives 12 MRP. Thus, we create a balanced rating system of the healthcare brand’s presence strength in the digital space, no matter whether it’s a healthcare project or a sports-rehabilitation startup.
The number of MRPs grow in correlation with rises the number of leads a brand generates through its main marketing channels.
Simply put, we can build the following model:
Promotion channels reinforcement => Brand’s MRP increase => Sales growth
Why does this model require MRank and MRP estimation? The tracing model principle, which helps to grasp the increase of sales volume even before their actual growth, comes into action here. You will understand the growth rate and what you invest your money in six months to a year in advance. Targeted actions across targeted channels bring a predictable result.
However, it’s impossible to make such an estimation with the standard approach when you have only a simple plan and obscurity ahead. Using MRank, we aim to structure the promotion process within a mathematical business model framework instead of the humanitarian abstraction spectra.
Working with such a structure, there is almost no chance of forgetting something and applying something in the wrong place or at the wrong time.
Where they are not waiting for you and are afraid of us
It’s great to be the strongest, the fastest and the most skilled. If you can easily adjust to or fit the environment, using its power by the aikido principle for your purposes, the result will be stunning.
Right now, we have to keep up with an environment of high competition, crowded Tops, bots, and, very soon, artificial intelligence.
If you want to push forward with volumes of standard ad campaigns, no problem. It’s up to you to try it out. But, sooner or later, the budget will run out and your brand will remain without the important solid connections that form passive lead generation.
